FDM imports excel files by using a named range that begins with "UPS" (which stands for Upstream)

The first cell in the named range is the table into which data will be imported. The next rows is the fields of the table and row 3-n are the data records.

I would strongly discourage you from importing data directly from excel unless you are using the journal functionality of FDM. FDM's workflow process optimizes the data import process using a temp table. If you were to write data directly to the table, you would be bypassing this key application functionality.